What’s keeping the payments industry busy right now and what’s next? On this note, every year we observe the market and start looking at the next disruption. However, looking closely at the big picture, we realize that there hasn’t been a real disruption within the payments market for quite some time. Instead, we’re all making the industry more efficient and handling its assets in a better way. We’re heading in the direction of open platforms, APIs, a trend that’s becoming stronger and stronger.

Our focus within the consumer-dominated landscape revolves around the open platforms trend. The only way to create added value through your services is by making use of consumer journey data to create new predictive modeling that will be the base of effective and modern solutions for the fast ecommerce space.

What’s our take on this approach? A couple of months ago we decided to enter into a strategic partnership with ING Group. One of our goals was to gain access to the banking data, which together with our payment insights and our in-house data analytics experts, gives us a deeper understanding of the consumer journey and transaction cycle. This way, we can constantly improve our payment solutions and keep up with the ever-changing consumers.

What do we need to keep an eye on? Fraud and security are for sure top of mind for all payments operators. As fraudsters become more and more skilled in their techniques, we have to make sure that we keep up with them and further develop our fraud prevention strategies.

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies

These two trends are definitely here to stay. Bitcoin has been around for already 10 years, with many of us thinking that it would disappear at some point. Its use ranges from payment solution to an item storing a certain value and we could expect it to move in different directions.

What’s missing at this point for cryptocurrencies? A crash like the 2002 Internet bubble that would bring good, solid solutions. Looking at the amount of attention that cryptocurrencies usually get from the younger generations, we could expect them to remain on the market, developing in a more concrete, professional form. For further insights on the influence of cryptocurrencies on the future of payments, be sure to have a look at this blog article.

AI

It’s almost too difficult to think about payments nowadays without mentioning AI. It’s the technology that helps us speed up operations and perform analyses and processes faster than ever before.

So, what’s the promise of AI for payments? Essentially, we’ll have better insights into what will happen in the future, being able to take timely action and adapt our approach to expected developments. However, looking at the current state, 90 percent of the industry doesn’t know the data in which to build the predictive modeling yet.

The proper steps are: make a good analysis of the data, then get all the valuable insights from it, followed by an accurate predictive modeling, which operators can automate at a later stage. It’s a complex process that involves great strategic work eventually resulting in the added value that payments operators are able to offer merchants with the help of modern solutions. For instance, working together with ING, enables us to analyze and make use of a greater amount of consumer journey data that in turn, allows us to optimize our modeling and integrate all the valuable insights into optimized payments solutions.

Trending Tech: VR

It’s definitely one of the most exciting technologies from a consumer point of view and we all know how involved we get when we’re dealing with a fascinating piece of technology that enhances our experience. VR is definitely very compatible with video gaming, creating incomparable experiences for gaming consumers. However, it remains a niche-focused trending technology, not posing a major impact on payments in the next couple of years due to the complexity of integrating it into the different channels consumers are using, as well as the slow adoption rate.

IoT

Open APIs facilitate the development of a more sophisticated form of IoT, which also needs standards and certain communication amongst the different devices. From a payment perspective, it will take a couple of years to come up with great solutions, giving us precious time to keep building an optimized experience to match modern consumer preferences.

Curious to know how the other peers see the industry right now. What is your current focus and what are you closely watching this year?

About Payvision

As one of the fastest-growing global acquiring networks in the world, Payvision connects banks, PSPs, ISOs and their merchants to ONE Global Acquiring Platform, based on a non-competitive partnership model in which all stakeholders share revenue, in an expanding profitable cross-border ecommerce market.